The breakthrough sci-fi role-playing-game is back in Mass Effect 2. Lead Commander Shepard through the galaxy once again as you interact with different alien races. Mass Effect 2 is set to blast off in early 2010 for the PC and
Xbox 360.

But the e-mails also show clearly that Microsoft executives saw early on that customers were likely to have negative experiences with the operating system, particularly when it came to compatibility with existing hardware. Sinofsky expressed surprise that Microsoft didn’t get more complaints to its support lines, but said that he did not take that as [...]

The NAND price crash has forced Micron and Intel to delay the “build out” of manufacturing capacity in Singapore, which is part of their joint flash memory venture, IM Flash Technologies, Micron said Wednesday.
Companies are now in survival mode, according to Cohen. “It is a matter of survival and everyone needs to figure out [...]

• Option 2 is a hard drive without the fancy display. Wolverine’s 120GB FlashPac costs $140. I’d have to rely on the camera for weeding out the dud shots, which probably is OK, but this is definitely the minimum-thrill approach.

I’m going to Latin America for the month of March, and I don’t know what to do [...]

It’s a good idea and whoever came up with it got a patent. I know that because the number, “U.S. Patent No. 5,205,473″ is printed in neat, black text right on the sleeve. (There’s actually a second patent number as well.) The reason the sleeve on my coffee cup, and most other patented products, have [...]

The company blog offers some tips and a dose of reality:

Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that the recruitment issue is “very serious,” and 59 percent said it was “moderately serious.”
Remember that most cleantech companies, at least those on CleanLoop, are backed by investors who want a return on their money. If they couldn’t make [...]

Samsung FP-T5094W Wireless Plasma: This is another CES 2007 product. This one wasn’t wireless HDMI per se, but it delivered the same de facto experience, thanks to a base station unit brimming with inputs that wirelessly transmitted to the standalone plasma panel. The product actually began shipping by the end of 2007, but the user [...]

commentary
Others? Is open source chipping away at the bloated price structures of traditional software vendors? (Yes, Savio, I use the word “chipping” judiciously.
An isolated incidence? Possibly. But where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. I imagine that this isn’t the only Fortune 500 company that is looking to shave the money it pays to Oracle [...]

[via Lifehacker]
Map creations can be embedded, which I’ve done after the break. You can also share them via e-mail or with a simple URL.
Draw on your maps with doodles and more using Quikmaps.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)
When Google launched its MyMaps feature last year I was pretty excited about the potential for creating things with it. Growing [...]

More than 80 percent of Americans with a DVR can’t live without it, according to a recent survey commissioned by NDS, a provider of technology solutions for digital pay TV.
Get a DVR, and maybe you won't need couples counseling anymore.

The survey (PDF) was conducted in July 2008 in the U.S., U.K., Italy, and Australia, [...]